To comfort the desponding parent with the thought that, without
diminishing the stock which is imperiously demanded to furnish the
more pressing and homely wants of our nature, he has disposed of one
or more perhaps out of a numerous offspring, under the shelter of a
care scarce less tender than the paternal, where not only their
bodily cravings shall be supplied, but that mental _pabulum_ is also
dispensed, which HE hath declared to be no less necessary to our
sustenance, who said, that, "not by bread alone man can live": for
this Christ's Hospital unfolds her bounty. Here neither, on the one
hand, are the youth lifted up above their family, which we must
suppose liberal, though reduced; nor on the other hand, are they
liable to be depressed below its level by the mean habits and
sentiments which a common charity-school generates. It is, in a word,
an Institution to keep those who have yet held up their heads in the
world, from sinking; to keep alive the spirit of a decent household,
when poverty was in danger of crushing it; to assist those who are
the most willing, but not always the most able, to assist themselves;
to separate a child from his family for a season, in order to render
him back hereafter, with feelings and habits more congenial to it,
than he could even have attained by remaining at home in the bosom of
it. It is a preserving and renovating principle, an antidote for the
_res angusta domi_, when it presses, as it always does, most heavily
upon the most ingenuous natures.

This is Christ's Hospital; and whether its character would be
improved by confining its advantages to the very lowest of the
people, let those judge who have witnessed the looks, the gestures,
the behavior, the manner of their play with one another, their
deportment towards strangers, the whole aspect and physiognomy of
that vast assemblage of boys on the London foundation, who freshen
and make alive again with their sports the else mouldering cloisters
of the old Grey Friars--which strangers who have never witnessed, if
they pass through Newgate Street, or by Smithfield, would do well to
go a little out of their way to see.

For the Christ's Hospital boy feels that he is no charity-boy; he
feels it in the antiquity and regality of the foundation to which he
belongs; in the usage which he meets with at school, and the
treatment he is accustomed to out of its bounds; in the respect and
even kindness, which his well-known garb never fails to procure him
in the streets of the metropolis; he feels it in his education, in
that measure of classical attainments, which every individual at that
school, though not destined to a learned profession, has it in his
power to procure, attainments which it would be worse than folly to
put it in the reach of the laboring classes to acquire: he feels it
in the numberless comforts, and even magnificences, which surround
him; in his old and awful cloisters, with their traditions; in his
spacious school-rooms, and in the well-ordered, airy, and lofty rooms
where he sleeps; in his stately dining-hall, hung round with
pictures, by Verrio, Lely, and others, one of them surpassing in size
and grandeur almost any other in the kingdom;[1] above all, in the
very extent and magnitude of the body to which he belongs, and the
consequent spirit, the intelligence, and public conscience, which is
the result of so many various yet wonderfully combining members.
Compared with this last-named advantage, what is the stock of
information (I do not here speak of book-learning, but of that
knowledge which boy receives from boy), the mass of collected
opinions, the intelligence in common, among the few and narrow
members of an ordinary boarding-school?

[Footnote 1: By Verrio, representing James the Second on his throne,
surrounded by his courtiers,(all curious portraits,) receiving the
mathematical pupils at their annual presentation: a custom still kept
up on New-year's-day at Court.]

The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character
of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common
charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought
up at some other of the public schools. There is _pride_ in it,
accumulated from the circumstances which I have described, as
differencing him from the former; and there is _a restraining
modesty_ from a sense of obligation and dependence, which must ever
keep his deportment from assimilating to that of the latter. His very
garb, as it is antique and venerable, feeds his self-respect; as it
is a badge of dependence, it restrains the natural petulance of that
age from breaking out into overt acts of insolence. This produces
silence and a reserve before strangers, yet not that cowardly shyness
which boys mewed up at home will feel; he will speak up when spoken
to, but the stranger must begin the conversation with him. Within his
bounds he is all fire and play; but in the streets he steals along
with all the self-concentration of a young monk. He is never known to
mix with other boys; they are a sort of laity to him. All this
proceeds, I have no doubt, from the continual consciousness which he
carries about him, of the difference of his dress from that of the
rest of the world; with a modest jealousy over himself, lest, by
overhastily mixing with common and secular playfellows, he should
commit the dignity of his cloth. Nor let any one laugh at this; for,
considering the propensity of the multitude, and especially of the
small multitude, to ridicule anything unusual in dress--above all,
where such peculiarity may be construed by malice into a mark of
disparagement--this reserve will appear to be nothing more than a
wise instinct in the Blue-coat boy. That it is neither pride nor
rusticity, at least that it has none of the offensive qualities of
either, a stranger may soon satisfy himself, by putting a question to
any of these boys: he may be sure of an answer couched in terms of
plain civility, neither loquacious nor embarrassed. Let him put the
same question to a parish-boy, or to one of the trencher-caps in the
---- cloisters, and the impudent reply of the one shall not fail to
exasperate any more than the certain servility, and mercenary eye to
reward, which he will meet with in the other, can fail to depress and
sadden him.

The Christ's Hospital boy is a religions character. His school is
eminently a religious foundation; it has its peculiar prayers, its
services at set times, its graces, hymns, and anthems, following each
other in an almost monastic closeness of succession. This religious
character in him is not always untinged with superstition. That is
not wonderful, when we consider the thousand tales and traditions
which must circulate, with undisturbed credulity, amongst so many
boys, that have so few checks to their belief from any intercourse
with the world at large; upon whom their equals in age must work so
much, their elders so little. With this leaning towards an
over-belief in matters of religion, which will soon correct itself
when he comes out into society, may be classed a turn for romance
above most other boys. This is to be traced in the same manner to
their excess of society with each other, and defect of mingling with
the world. Hence the peculiar avidity with which such books as the
"Arabian Nights' Entertainments," and others of a still wilder cast,
are, or at least were in my time, sought for by the boys. I remember
when some half-dozen of them set off from school, without map, card,
or compass, on a serious expedition to find out _Philip Quarll's
Island_.

The Christ's Hospital boy's sense of right and wrong is peculiarly
tender and apprehensive. It is even apt to run out into ceremonial
observances, and to impose a yoke upon itself beyond the strict
obligations of the moral law. Those who were contemporaries with me
at that school thirty years ago, will remember with what more than
Judaic rigor the eating of the fat of certain boiled meats[1] was
interdicted. A boy would have blushed as at the exposure of some
heinous immorality, to have been detected eating that forbidden
portion of his allowance of animal food, the whole of which, while he
was in health, was little more than sufficient to allay his hunger.
The same, or even greater, refinement was shown in the rejection of
certain kinds of sweet-cake. What gave rise to these supererogatory
penances, these self-denying ordinances, I could never learn;[2] they
certainly argue no defect of the conscientious principle. A little
excess in that article is not undesirable in youth, to make allowance
for the inevitable waste which comes in maturer years. But in the
less ambiguous line of duty, in those directions of the moral
feelings which cannot be mistaken or depreciated, I will relate what
took place in the year 1785, when Mr. Perry, the steward, died. I
must be pardoned for taking my instances from my own times. Indeed,
the vividness of my recollections, while I am upon this subject,
almost bring back those times; they are present to me still. But I
believe that in the years which have elapsed since the period which I
speak of, the character of the Christ's Hospital boy is very little
changed. Their situation in point of many comforts is improved; but
that which I ventured before to term the _public conscience_ of the
school, the pervading moral sense, of which every mind partakes and
to which so many individual minds contribute, remains, I believe,
pretty much the same as when I left it. I have seen, within this
twelvemonth almost, the change which has been produced upon a boy of
eight or nine years of age, upon being admitted into that school;
how, from a pert young coxcomb, who thought that all knowledge was
comprehended within his shallow brains, because a smattering of two
or three languages and one or two sciences were stuffed into him by
injudicious treatment at home, by a mixture with the wholesome
society of so many school-fellows, in less time than I have spoken
of, he has sunk to his own level, and is contented to be carried on
in the quiet orbit of modest self-knowledge in which the common mass
of that unpresumptuous assemblage of boys seem to move: from being a
little unfeeling mortal, he has got to feel and reflect. Nor would it
be a difficult matter to show how, at a school like this, where the
boy is neither entirely separated from home, nor yet exclusively
under its influence, the best feelings, the filial for instance, are
brought to a maturity which they could not have attained under a
completely domestic education; how the relation of a parent is
rendered less tender by unremitted association, and the very
awfulness of age is best apprehended by some sojourning amidst the
comparative levity of youth; how absence, not drawn out by too great
extension into alienation or forgetfulness, puts an edge upon the
relish of occasional intercourse, and the boy is made the better
_child_ by that which keeps the force of that relation from being
felt as perpetually pressing on him; how the substituted paternity,
into the care of which he is adopted, while in everything substantial
it makes up for the natural, in the necessary omission of individual
fondnesses and partialities, directs the mind only the more strongly
to appreciate that natural and first tie, in which such weaknesses
are the bond of strength, and the appetite which craves after them
betrays no perverse palate. But these speculations rather belong to
the question of the comparative advantages of a public over a private
education in general. I must get back to my favorite school; and to
that which took place when our old and good steward died.

[Footnote 1: Under the denomination of _gage_.]

[Footnote 2: I am told that the late steward [Mr. Hathaway], who
evinced on many occasions a most praiseworthy anxiety to promote the
comfort of the boys, had occasion for all his address and
perseverance to eradicate the first of these unfortunate prejudices,
in which he at length happily succeeded, and thereby restored to one
half of the animal nutrition of the school those honors which painful
superstition and blind zeal had so long conspired to withhold from
it.]

And I will say that when I think of the frequent instances which I
have met with in children, of a hard-heartedness, a callousness, and
insensibility to the loss of relations, even of those who have begot
and nourished them, I cannot but consider it as a proof of something
in the peculiar conformation of that school, favorable to the
expansion of the best feelings of our nature, that at the period
which I am noticing, out of five hundred boys there was not a dry eye
to be found among them, nor a heart that did not beat with genuine
emotion. Every impulse to play, until the funeral day was past,
seemed suspended throughout the school; and the boys, lately so
mirthful and sprightly, were seen pacing their cloisters alone, or in
sad groups standing about, few of them without some token, such as
their slender means could provide, a black riband or something, to
denote respect and a sense of their loss. The time itself was a time
of anarchy, a time in which all authority (out of school hours) was
abandoned. The ordinary restraints were for those days superseded;
and the gates, which at other times kept us in, were left without
watchers. Yet, with the exception of one or two graceless boys at
most, who took advantage of that suspension of authorities to _skulk
out_, as it was called, the whole body of that great school kept
rigorously within their bounds, by a voluntary self-imprisonment; and
they who broke bounds, though they escaped punishment from any
master, fell into a general disrepute among us, and, for that which
at any other time would have been applauded and admired as a mark of
spirit, were consigned to infamy and reprobation; so much _natural
government_ have gratitude and the principles of reverence and love,
and so much did a respect to their dead friend prevail with these
Christ's Hospital boys, above any fear which his presence among them
when living could ever produce. And if the impressions which were
made on my mind so long ago are to be trusted, very richly did their
steward deserve this tribute. It is a pleasure to me even now to call
to mind his portly form, the regal awe which he always contrived to
inspire, in spite of a tenderness and even weakness of nature that
would have enfeebled the reins of discipline in any other master; a
yearning of tenderness towards those under his protection, which
could make five hundred boys at once feel towards him each as to
their individual father. He had faults, with which we had nothing to
do; but, with all his faults, indeed, Mr. Perry was a most
extraordinary creature. Contemporary with him and still living,
though he has long since resigned his occupation, will it be
impertinent to mention the name of our excellent upper
grammar-master, the Rev. James Boyer? He was a disciplinarian,
indeed, of a different stamp from him whom I have just described;
but, now the terrors of the rod, and of a temper a little too hasty
to leave the more nervous of us quite at our ease to do justice to
his merits in those days, are long since over, ungrateful were we if
we should refuse our testimony to that unwearied assiduity with which
he attended to the particular improvement of each of us. Had we been
the offspring of the first gentry in the land, he could not have been
instigated by the strongest views of recompense and reward to have
made himself a greater slave to the most laborious of all occupations
than he did for us sons of charity, from whom, or from our parents,
he could expect nothing. He has had his reward in the satisfaction of
having discharged his duty, in the pleasurable consciousness of
having advanced the respectability of that institution to which, both
man and boy, he was attached; in the honors to which so many of his
pupils have successfully aspired at both our Universities; and in the
staff with which the Governors of the Hospital, at the close of his
hard labors, with the highest expressions of the obligations the
school lay under to him, unanimously voted to present him.

I have often considered it among the felicities of the constitution
of this school, that the offices of steward and school-master are
kept distinct; the strict business of education alone devolving upon
the latter, while the former has the charge of all things out of
school, the control of the provisions, the regulation of meals, of
dress, of play, and the ordinary intercourse of the boys. By this
division of management, a superior respectability must attach to the
teacher, while his office is unmixed with any of these lower
concerns. A still greater advantage over the construction of common
boarding-schools is to be found in the settled salaries of the
masters, rendering them totally free of obligation to any individual
pupil, or his parents. This never fails to have its effect at schools
where each boy can reckon up to a hair what profit the master derives
from him, where he views him every day in the light of a caterer, a
provider for the family, who is to get so much by him in each of his
meals. Boys will see and consider these things; and how much must the
sacred character of preceptor suffer in their minds by these
degrading associations! The very bill which the pupil carries home
with him at Christmas, eked out, perhaps, with elaborate though
necessary minuteness, instructs him that his teachers have other ends
than the mere love to learning, in the lessons which they give him;
and though they put into his hands the fine sayings of Seneca or
Epictetus, yet they themselves are none of those disinterested
pedagogues to teach philosophy _gratis_. The master, too, is sensible
that he is seen in this light; and how much this must lessen that
affectionate regard to the learners which alone can sweeten the
bitter labor of instruction, and convert the whole business into
unwelcome and uninteresting task-work, many preceptors that I have
conversed with on the subject are ready, with a sad heart, to
acknowledge. From this inconvenience the settled salaries of the
masters of this school in great measure exempt them; while the happy
custom of choosing masters (indeed every officer of the
establishment) from those who have received their education there,
gives them an interest in advancing the character of the school, and
binds them to observe a tenderness and a respect to the children, in
which a stranger, feeling that independence which I have spoken of,
might well be expected to fail.

In affectionate recollections of the place where he was bred up, in
hearty recognitions of old school-fellows met with again after the
lapse of years, or in foreign countries, the Christ's Hospital boy
yields to none; I might almost say, he goes beyond most other boys.
The very compass and magnitude of the school, its thousand bearings,
the space it takes up in the imagination beyond the ordinary schools,
impresses a remembrance, accompanied with an elevation of mind, that
attends him through life. It is too big, too affecting an object, to
pass away quickly from his mind. The Christ's Hospital boy's friends
at school are commonly his intimates through life. For me, I do not
know whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too
obstinately to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted
ratio to the usual sentiments of mankind, nothing that I have been
engaged in since seems of any value or importance compared to the
colors which imagination gave to everything then. I belong to no
_body corporate_ such as I then made a part of.--And here, before I
close, taking leave of the general reader, and addressing myself
solely to my old school-fellows, that were contemporaries with me
from the year 1782 to 1789, let me have leave to remember some of
those circumstances of our school, which they will not be unwilling
to have brought back to their minds.

And first, let us remember, as first in importance in our childish
eyes, the young men (as they almost were) who, under the denomination
of _Grecians_, were waiting the expiration of the period when they
should be sent, at the charges of the Hospital, to one or other of
our universities, but more frequently to Cambridge. These youths,
from their superior acquirements, their superior age and stature, and
the fewness of their numbers (for seldom above two or three at a time
were inaugurated into that high order), drew the eyes of all, and
especially of the younger boys, into a reverent observance and
admiration. How tall they used to seem to us! how stately would they
pace along the cloisters! while the play of the lesser boys was
absolutely suspended, or its boisterousness at least allayed, at
their presence! Not that they ever beat or struck the boys--that
would have been to have demeaned themselves--the dignity of their
persons alone insured them all respect. The task of blows, of
corporal chastisement, they left to the common monitors, or heads of
wards, who, it must be confessed, in our time had rather too much
license allowed them to oppress and misuse their inferiors; and the
interference of the Grecian, who may be considered as the spiritual
power, was not unfrequently called for, to mitigate by its mediation
the heavy unrelenting arm of this temporal power, or monitor. In
fine, the Grecians were the solemn Muftis of the school. Eras were
computed from their time;--it used to be said, such or such a thing
was done when S---- or T---- was Grecian.

As I ventured to call the Grecians, the Muftis of the school, the
King's boys,[1] as their character then was, may well pass for the
Janissaries. They were the terror of all the other boys; bred up
under that hardy sailor, as well as excellent mathematician and
conavigator with Captain Cook, William Wales. All his systems were
adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to
encounter. Frequent and severe punishments which were expected to be
borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as
inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To
make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to
be his only aim; to this everything was subordinate. Moral
obliquities, indeed, were sure of receiving their full recompense,
for no occasion of laying on the lash was ever let slip; but the
effects expected to be produced from it were something very different
from contrition or mortification. There was in William Wales a
perpetual fund of humor, a constant glee about him, which, heightened
by an inveterate provincialism of north-country dialect, absolutely
took away the sting from his severities. His punishments were a game
at patience, in which the master was not always worst contented when
he found himself at times overcome by his pupil. What success this
discipline had, or how the effects of it operated upon the
after-lives of these King's boys, I cannot say: but I am sure that,
for the time, they were absolute nuisances to the rest of the school.
Hardy, brutal, and often wicked, they were the most graceless lump in
the whole mass; older and bigger than the other boys, (for, by the
system of their education they were kept longer at school by two or
three years than any of the rest, except the Grecians,) they were a
constant terror to the younger part of the school; and some who may
read this, I doubt not, will remember the consternation into which
the juvenile fry of us were thrown, when the cry was raised in the
cloisters, that _the First Order was coming_--for so they termed the
first form or class of those boys. Still these sea-boys answered some
good purposes, in the school. They were the military class among the
boys, foremost in athletic exercises, who extended the fame of the
prowess of the school far and near; and the apprentices in the
vicinage, and sometimes the butchers' boys in the neighboring market,
had sad occasion to attest their valor.

[Footnote 1: The mathematical pupils, bred up to the sea, on the
foundation of Charles the Second.]

The time would fail me if I were to attempt to enumerate all those
circumstances, some pleasant, some attended with some pain, which,
seen through the mist of distance, come sweetly softened to the
memory. But I must crave leave to remember our transcending
superiority in those invigorating sports, leap-frog, and basting the
bear; our delightful excursions in the summer holidays to the New
River, near Newington, where, like otters, we would live the long day
in the water, never caring for dressing ourselves, when we had once
stripped; our savory meals afterwards, when we came home almost
famished with staying out all day without our dinners; our visits at
other times to the Tower, where, by ancient privilege, we had free
access to all the curiosities; our solemn procession through the City
at Easter, with the Lord Mayor's largess of buns, wine, and a
shilling, with the festive questions and civic pleasantries of the
dispensing Aldermen, which were more to us than all the rest of the
banquet; our stately suppings in public, where the well-lighted hall
and the confluence of well-dressed company who came to see us, made
the whole look more like a concert or assembly, than a scene of a
plain bread and cheese collation; the annual orations upon St.
Matthew's day, in which the senior scholar, before he had done,
seldom failed to reckon up, among those who had done honor to our
school by being educated in it, the names of those accomplished
critics and Greek scholars, Joshua Barnes and Jeremiah Markland (I
marvel they left out Camden while they were about it). Let me have
leave to remember our hymns and anthems, and well-toned organ; the
doleful tune of the burial anthem chanted in the solemn cloisters,
upon the seldom-occurring funeral of some school-fellow; the
festivities at Christmas, when the richest of us would club our stock
to have a gaudy day, sitting round the fire, replenished to the
height with logs, and the penniless, and he that could contribute
nothing, partook in all the mirth, and in some of the
substantialities of the feasting; the carol sung by night at that
time of the year, which, when a young boy, I have so often lain awake
to hear from seven (the hour of going to bed) till ten, when it was
sung by the older boys and monitors, and have listened to it, in
their rude chanting, till I have been transported in fancy to the
fields of Bethlehem, and the song which was sung at that season, by
angels' voices to the shepherds.

Nor would I willingly forget any of those things which administered
to our vanity. The hem-stitched bands and town-made shirts, which
some of the most fashionable among us wore; the town-girdles, with
buckles of silver, or shining stone; the badges of the sea-boys; the
cots, or superior shoestrings, of the monitors; the medals of the
markers; (those who were appointed to hear the Bible read in the
wards on Sunday morning and evening,) which bore on their obverse in
silver, as certain parts of our garments carried, in meaner metal,
the countenance of our Founder, that godly and royal child, King
Edward the Sixth, the flower of the Tudor name--the young flower that
was untimely cropt, as it began to fill our land with its early
odors--the boy-patron of boys--the serious and holy child who walked
with Cranmer and Bidley--fit associate, in those tender years, for
the bishops, and future martyrs of our Church, to receive, or, (as
occasion sometimes proved,) to give instruction.

"But, ah! what means the silent tear?
Why, e'en 'mid joy, my bosom heave?
Ye long-lost scenes, enchantments dear!
Lo! now I linger o'er your grave.

"--Fly, then, ye hours of rosy hue,
And bear away the bloom of years!
And quick succeed, ye sickly crew
Of doubts and sorrows, pains and fears!

"Still will I ponder Fate's unaltered plan,
Nor, tracing back the child, forget that I am man."[1]

[Footnote 1: Lines meditated in the cloisters of Christ's Hospital,
in the "Poetics," of Mr. George Dyer.]


*       *       *       *       *


ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPEARE.

CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR STAGE-REPRESENTATION.

Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the
affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen
before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the
celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good
Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of consecrated
ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction
of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us
of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this
harlequin figure the following lines:--

"To paint fair Nature, by divine command
Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
A Shakspeare rose; then, to expand his fame
Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,
The Actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
Immortal Garrick called them back to day:
And till Eternity with power sublime
Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,
Shakspeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,
And earth irradiate with a beam divine."

It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt
anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and
nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder,
how, from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should
have been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that
has had the luck to please the Town in any of the great characters of
Shakspeare, with the notion of possessing a _mind congenial with the
poet's_; how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the
power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty
of being able to read or recite the same when put into words;[1]or
what connection that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man,
which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon
the eye and ear, which a player, by observing a few general effects,
which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c., usually has upon the
gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the internal
workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for
instance, the _when_ and the _why_ and the _how far_ they should be
moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to
pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the
slackening is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of
a vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare
imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or
gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and
emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all
but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief,
generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it
differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the
actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye
(without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible
sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which
we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow
apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are
apt not only to sink the playwriter in the consideration which we pay
to the actor, but even to identify in our minds, in a perverse
manner, the actor with the character which he represents. It is
difficult for a frequent play-goer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet
from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while
we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion
incidental alone to unlettered persons, who, not possessing the
advantage of reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player
for all the pleasure which they can receive from the drama, and to
whom the very idea of _what an author is_ cannot be made
comprehensible without some pain and perplexity of mind: the error is
one from which persons otherwise not meanly lettered, find it almost
impossible to extricate themselves.

[Footnote 1: It is observable that we fall into this confusion only
in dramatic recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads
Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a great poet
and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davis, the bookseller, who
is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any man in
England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some
mistake in this tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends,
set upon a level with Milton.]

Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of
satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the
first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which those two
great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody
and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape.
But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure,
this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our
cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and
brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We
have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.

How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions
thus cramped and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing
actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness,
with which we turn to those plays of Shakspeare which have escaped
being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the
same writer which have happily been left out in the performance. How
far the very custom of hearing anything _spouted_, withers and blows
upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from Henry the
Fifth, &c., which are current in the mouths of school-boys, from
their being to be found in _Enfield's Speaker_, and such kind of
books! I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated
soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning "To be or not to be," or to tell
whether it be good, bad or indifferent, it has been so handled and
pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from
its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is
become to me a perfect dead member.

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the
plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage,
than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their
distinguishing excellence is a reason that they should be so. There
is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting,
with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.

The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of
passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more
hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously
possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons
talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner
talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular
upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are
here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this
war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed
round such "intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the direct
object of the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in
Shakspeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form of _speaking_,
whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a
highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into
possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of
mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at
_in that form of composition_ by any gift short of intuition. We do
here as we do with novels written in the _epistolary form_. How many
improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with
in Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight which that
form upon the whole gives us!

But the practice of stage-representation reduces everything to a
controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous
blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must
play the orator. The love dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those
silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night! the more intimate
and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a
Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so
delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful
dalliances in Paradise--

"As beseem'd
Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league,
Alone;"

by the inherent fault of stage-representation, how are these things
sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large
assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come
drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though
nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed
at the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her
returns of love!

The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of
Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest
ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one
of their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play,
and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation.
The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other,
and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral
instruction. But Hamlet himself--what does he suffer meanwhile by
being dragged forth as the public schoolmaster, to give lectures to
the crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are
transactions between himself and his moral sense; they are the
effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires to holes and
corners and the most sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth;
or rather, they are the silent meditations with which his bosom is
bursting, reduced to _words_ for the sake of the reader, who must
else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These profound
sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, which the
tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be
represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out
before an audience, making four hundred people his confidants at
once! I say not that it is the fault of the actor so to do; he must
pronounce them _ore rotundo_; he must accompany them with his eye; he
must insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of eye, tone or
gesture, or he fails. _He must be thinking all the while of his
appearance, because he knows that all the while the spectators are
judging of it_. And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent,
retiring Hamlet!

It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity
of thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who
otherwise would never earn it for themselves by reading, and the
intellectual acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be
inestimable; but I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted,
but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted. I have
heard much of the wonders which Garrick performed in this part; but
as I never saw him, I must have leave to doubt whether the
representation of such a character came within the province of his
art. Those who tell me of him, speak of his eye, of the magic of his
eye, and of his commanding voice: physical properties, vastly
desirable in an actor, and without which he can never insinuate
meaning into an auditory,--but what have they to do with Hamlet; what
have they to do with intellect? In fact, the things aimed at in
theatrical representation, are to arrest the spectator's eye upon the
form and the gesture, and so to gain a more favorable hearing to what
is spoken: it is not what the character is, but how he looks; not
what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no reason to think that if
the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as
Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally
omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakspeare,
his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of
passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to
furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an
audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent
Shakspeare to us differently from his representation of Banks or
Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince, and must
be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in his mind, wavering
in his conduct, seemingly cruel to Ophelia; he might see a ghost, and
start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be his father;
all this in the poorest and most homely language of the servilest
creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an audience;
without troubling Shakspeare for the matter: and I see not but there
would be room for all the power which an actor has, to display
itself. All the passions and changes of passion might remain: for
those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought; it is
a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a note or
two in the voice, a whisper with a significant foreboding look to
announce its approach, and so contagious the counterfeit appearance
of any emotion is, that let the words be what they will, the look and
tone shall carry it off, and make it pass for deep skill in the
passions.

It is common for people to talk of Shakspeare's plays being _so
natural_; that everybody can understand him. They are natural indeed,
they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies
out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the same persons say
that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural,
that they are both very deep; and to them they are the same kind of
thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of
young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit a _trifling
peccadillo_, the murder of an uncle or so[1] that is all, and so
comes to an untimely end, which is _so moving_; and at the other,
because a blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white
wife; and the odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would
willingly behold the same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and
have thought the rope more due to Othello than to Barnwell. For of
the texture of Othello's mind, the inward construction marvellously
laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic
confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing
from the depths of love, they see no more than the spectators at a
cheaper rate, who pay their pennies apiece to look through the man's
telescope in Leicester-fields, see into the inward plot and
topography of the moon. Some dim thing or other they see; they see an
actor personating a passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, and
they recognize it as a copy of the usual external effects of such
passions; or at least as being true to _that symbol of the emotion
which passes current at the theatre for it_, for it is often no more
than that: but of the grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a
great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of
tragedy,--that common auditors know anything of this, or can have any
such notions dinned into them by the mere strength of an actor's
lungs,--that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus infused
into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how it can
be possible.

[Footnote 1: If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the
Managers, I would entreat and beg of them, in the name of both the
Galleries, that this insult upon the morality of the common people of
London should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks.
Why are the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead
of an amusement, to be treated over and over again with a nauseous
sermon of George Barnwell? Why _at the end of their vistas_ are we to
place the _gallows_?  Were I an uncle, I should not much like a
nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes. It is
really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon
such slight motives;--it is attributing too much to such characters
as Millwood:--it is putting things into the heads of good young men,
which they would never otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think
anything of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain
against it.]

We talk of Shakspeare's admirable observations of life, when we
should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and
every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but
from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the
very "sphere of humanity," he fetched those images of virtue and of
knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing a part, think we
comprehend in our natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the
powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than
indigenous faculties of our own minds, which only waited the
application of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and
clear echo of the same.

To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that
wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is
that soreness of mind which makes him treat the intrusions of
Polonius with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his
interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be
not mixed in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to
alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind